7 Simple Ways to Reduce Shopping Cart Abandonment by Half

If you’re an e-commerce store owner, there’s a good chance that cart abandonment is one of your core frustrations. In fact, the average abandoned cart rate is 69.23%, according to Baymard Institute. This represents a significant loss of revenue.

But if you’re able to revive a number of your abandoned carts, you can vastly improve the profitability of your business. Take advantage of the following tactics and you can dramatically lower your abandoned cart rate:

1. Use staggered discounts

In order to encourage a purchase, many marketers like to include discounts in their abandoned cart emails. I think this is a good idea, but I recommend taking it a step further.

The longer it’s been since someone added a product to their cart without purchasing, the less likely it is that they will ever convert. Your ideal window for reviving a lost cart is in the first 48 hours after the event. Instead of offering the same discount to every customer who leaves their cart, offer a more significant discount to those who’ve been inactive longer. For example, you might offer a 10% discount the day after the abandonment, whereas a 20% discount could be given to customers who’ve been inactive for two weeks as an added incentive.

Sure, a larger discount means less profit—but no sale means zero profit. Once you’ve gotten the initial sale, you can continue marketing to these customers in the future for repeat business.

2. Install a currency converter

If you’re selling to an international audience (as most stores do), it’s advisable to show prices in each customer’s native currency. You don’t want your customers leaving your site to consult Google to perform currency conversions to find out how much they’re going to have to pay. This can really skyrocket your cart abandonment.

If you use the Shopify platform, I recommend installing the BEST Currency Converter from the app store. This app automatically detects the location of your customers and will display their country’s currency as soon as they arrive on your home page.

3. Offer free shipping

If presented with unexpected shipping costs at the checkout, 28% of shoppers will abandon their carts. To bring this number down, consider upping your prices and include free shipping—and if you serve an international audience, offer free worldwide shopping. This means that the profitability of your orders will change slightly depending on which region you ship to, but it also makes for a much smoother experience for your customers.

Don’t just take my word for it, conduct a split test and see if free shipping works for you. If you have a landing page for a $10 product that costs $5 to ship, consider sending traffic to a variant page that sells the product for $15 including shipping. You might be surprised by the results. In either case, you receive the same payment.

4. Allow for a smooth checkout process

Make sure that your checkout process is as fast and simple as humanly possible. Don’t force customers to sign up for an account at your store just to make a purchase—this makes things more complicated than they need to be. The less information a customer has to type in to get to the checkout page, the better.